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The Morning After: Brunch at c5

By Ivy Knight, Special to the Star

Wed., Oct. 26, 2011

c5 Restaurant

100 Queen’s Park in the Royal Ontario Museum

Sunday brunch: 11:30 a.m. - 2:30 p.m.

416 586-7928

c5restaurant.ca

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On the plate: Pork Belly sandwich, $18

Mouth feel: You read the description in the c5 menu and think about your Lululemon yoga pants, little flickers of remorse over the hateful hours in spin class going to waste. Bite the bullet and order it, maybe forgo the egg as I did and you just might have a shot at getting out of this unharmed. The price tag is close to $20: can a sandwich really be worth that much? Yes, when just preparing all the ingredients that go into said sandwich takes the kitchen crew five days, four of which are spent brining the pork belly from Cumbrae’s before braising it for six hours.

Cabbage gets brined for two days for the choucroute, before being cooked for four hours. The pork belly sliced and served on a steamed milk bun with kohlrabi-apple slaw and Kozlik’s smoky mustard. The bun is speared with a sweet pickle on a skewer and comes plated with a stack of buttermilk dipped and panko-crusted onion rings. If you’re looking for a gateway drug to fried food addiction, start with these golden onion halos. Order a Cranberry Cooler, a mix of the tart juice with earl grey tea, ginger ale and fresh lemon. The drink delivers a welcome sweetly sour slap to the face after all that lardaceous indulgence. What? It’s a word!

The scene: This dining room on the top floor of the Royal Ontario Museum is almost too sleek and slick for the sensibly shod tourists consulting a map of the building over brunch. The elegant, refined plating coming out of the kitchen suits the elevated air of the room, while the humble, local ingredients ensure that the mixed crowd showing up for Sunday brunch never feels discombobulated.

“We get a mix of museum-goers and hungover hipsters looking for grease. They always go for the pork belly sandwich or the bacon tasting menu,” says Corrado, adding that the sandwich is the most popular thing on the menu. His bacon tasting menu features five different housemade bacons, including cherrywood smoked, double-smoked, miso-cured guanciale and pancetta.

The spiky lighting and angled glass in the room are reminiscent of Superman’s Fortress of Solitude. The CN Tower peeking through the bright southern-facing wall of windows reassures that we’re not in a cave in the arctic with Lois Lane but rather right here in Toronto the Good.

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